Who is he and where did he come from?
He’s Chad Samuel Tracy and he comes from the land of baseball lifers. While he is decidedly not the Chad Tracy who spent the bulk of a mid-sized career with the Diamondbacks in the early part of this century, this Chad Tracy has spent his entire life around the game. Chad’s father Jim played professional baseball for eight years, breaking through to the Majors with the Cubs for 87 games while otherwise bouncing around between places like Pompono Beach, Florida and Yokohama, Japan.
Chad never knew
his father as a ballplayer, as he was born one season after his old man finally put his glove away for good. But he always knew his father as a coach. Jim Tracy got his first minor league managerial gig with the Peoria Chiefs when Chad was just two years old and then spent the next 20 years coaching in some capacity, culminating in his 11-year stretch as a big league manager with the Dodgers, Pirates, and Rockies.
Naturally, Chad himself was a ballplayer. He starred as a catcher at Pepperdine University, winning the West Coast Conference Player of the year award in 2005 before being drafted by the Texas Rangers in the third round. Tracy spent the next eight years in the minors, slowly climbing the ladder and eventually playing 390 games at the AAA level but never cracking the majors for so much as a cup of coffee.
After spending two years in the independent Atlantic League, the then-28-year-old Tracy finally gave up the dream and followed his father’s footsteps into the manager’s office, making his debut with the single-A Burlington Bees in the Angels organization the very next year. He would go on to spend seven years with the Angels, the last four as their Minor League Coordinator before being hired to lead the WooSox by Chaim Bloom in 2022.
Is he any good?
I will happily die on the hill known as Mount None of Us Actually Knows Whether a Baseball Manager is Any Good. Baseball is not a sport like basketball or soccer, where coaches develop certain tactical schemes and distinct styles of play. It’s not football, where the head coach is often the final decision-maker on roster moves. Baseball is ultimately a players’ game. Modern managers are tasked with keeping the roster focused and engaged for 162 games while implementing the front office’s player personnel plan.
Having said that, there obviously are managers who are better or worse than others when it comes to creating and maintaining a winning clubhouse culture (Terry Francona on the former hand, Bobby Valentine on the latter). Tracy has a few things going for him to suggest he could be a good fit for this Red Sox team.
First and most importantly, he has a ton of experience coaching a lot of players on this Red Sox roster. Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, Ceddanne Rafaela, Wilyer Abreu, Connelly Early, Patyon Tolle, Brayan Bello, Connor Wong, and Jarren Duran all spent significant stretches playing under Tracy at Worcester. Notably, all of them arrived at Fenway as developmental successes.
Secondly, he does have a winning track record. Tracy’s WooSox teams went 323-295 during his tenure. Win-loss records in the minor leagues don’t really mean anything, obviously — winning isn’t the point in the minor leagues. But you’d certainly rather have a manager used to winning rather than losing. Tracy won enough and was respected enough that his managerial peers voted him as the International League’s “best managerial prospect” two years in a row in 2023 and 2024.
And finally, it’s often said that great players make poor coaches, the theory being that baseball came so easily to them that they struggle to communicate how to play the game to players of lesser talents. If there’s any truth to that, then perhaps the inverse is also true. Tracy spent eight years grinding in the minors and came tantalizingly close to reaching his dreams, only to, like Moonlight Graham, watch them pass him by like strangers in a crowd. Perhaps his particular background makes him a better baseball communicator than most.
What’s he doing in his picture up there?
He appears to be praying, only with a baseball subbed in for the rosary. And that’s the perfectly romantic image of a minor league lifer, isn’t it?
What’s his role on the 2026 Red Sox?
Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? Right now he has the interim tag attached to his job title and we haven’t yet heard whether Craig Breslow will attempt to find a full-time manager during the season. Tracy may end up being a mere placeholder.
But Tracy is someone who was almost certainly going to become a big league manager one day. And as he prepares to make his debut this afternoon, he’s well-positioned to succeed, managing a roster he’s familiar with that should be performing a lot better than it has so far. If the Sox are able to get things in gear over the coming weeks and months, then maybe Breslow won’t need to post an opening on the Red Sox LinkedIn page at all.
